Mugglestone - The Oxford History of English

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In some cases, aYrmative do could also assume an emphatic function, conWrming or contradicting something. As we have seen, for example, on p. 202, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton was answering the charges made against him and admitted that some of them had not been unfounded, hence his use of do in ‘I confess I did mislike the Queenes Mariage’. It may of course not always be easy to distinguish emphatic from non-emphatic instances of do in writing. But as suggested above when Throckmorton’s trial was discussed, from these clause-level considerations it is but a short step to marking information relevant to the discourse topic. This is how the clustering of do in trials may be understood—just like in the modern example on smoking which was discussed on p. 198. In sum, aYrmative do clearly proves a useful multi-purpose device in Tudor English. Comparing the seventeenth-century with present-day corpora, we also see that despite the declining numbers, there was more use for it in Stuart English than we have for it today.

in conclusion

Language change does not happen overnight or spread uniformly throughout the country across the whole social spectrum. In this chapter we have seen that even the most familiar aspects of the English language are the result of quite intricate processes of change. The modern standard variety of English largely displays features of southern (East Midland) origin, but it also contains elements that originated in the north. The verbal ending -(e)s is one of them. It Wrst gained ground in everyday speech and informal writings, and only made its way to formal contexts with some considerable delay. The auxiliary do, by contrast, shows that a change need not always proceed to completion. The spread of do to aYrmative statements was well under way in Tudor English but, unlike its continued use in questions and negative statements, the process suddenly came to a halt. Here too, dialect contact may have had a role in shaping the supra-local variety which came to be seen as the standard.

Gender diVerences also play a role in ongoing changes. Both today and in the past, it is usually women who more readily than men adopt incoming forms spreading across the language community. This was the case, for instance, with the third-person -(e)s ending. Many grammatical features that became the property of Tudor English were Wrst promoted by women. Obvious exceptions to this gender advantage were changes that came from the

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learned and literary domains of language use. As observed in Chapter 8, the Wrst monolingual English dictionary, Cawdrey’s hard-word dictionary (1604), was compiled for the use of ‘Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other vnskilfull persons’.

When a language change is in progress, people use both old and new forms. Analysing these forms in context tells us more about the ways in which speakers and writers make use of the variants available to them. Some have linguistic constraints, such as -(e)s and do, which diVuse to certain words later than to others. Others are primarily socially determined. The spread of you at the expense of thou illustrates a deferential practice being adopted in the private sphere. As forms of address are not Wxed but can be negotiated, the social status and roles of the writer and the addressee were at issue throughout this process.

In conclusion, if we wish to Wnd out where language changes come from and how they progress through the language community, we need to compare texts from the same time period representing diVerent genres and dialect areas, as well as texts produced by both women and men. Ideally, we should have data from all social ranks, but unfortunately this is not the case in the Tudor period. Because of their poor or, in many cases, non-existent writing skills, the voices of the lower-ranking people have only been recorded in trials and imitated in drama, and women are less well represented than men. This is one reason why we shall never know everything that happened in Tudor English. But a good deal can be learnt from the data sources that have come down to us when they are organized into corpora as structured collections of digitized texts.

References, Corpus Resources, and Further Reading

The historical corpora discussed in this chapter are available for educational and research purposes through ICAME (the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English; <http://helmer.aksis.uib.no/icame.html>) and the Oxford Text Archive (<http:// ota.ahds.ac.uk/>): the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (HC), the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (HCOS), and a sampler version of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEECS). The copyright on the texts included in the corpora is retained by their publishers or editors, and the copyright on the corpus collections by their compilers, both speciWed in the accompanying electronic manuals, which also give full references to the texts.

More information about the HC is given in the corpus manual, Kyto¨ (1996), and about the Early Modern English texts in the HC by Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brun- berg (1993). For the HCOS, see Meurman-Solin (1993, 1995). The CEEC is introduced

8

THE BABEL OF

RENAISSANCE ENGLISH

Paula Blank

THE early modern period in England saw the Wrst systematic attempts to create, or recreate, a universal language, a ‘perfect’ tongue. SigniWcantly, the declared motive behind the numerous universal languages designed and advanced in the seventeenth century was to ‘remedy Babel’, to level the diversity of human vernaculars and, on a national level, to undo a perceived confusion with English itself by reconstructing or inventing a common language. Many scholarly histories of the English language have often appeared to have the same, implicit aim—pre-emptively to ‘Wx’ the problem of linguistic diversity within early modern England. And it was considered a problem. Long accounted the ancient source of national, racial, and linguistic diVerences, the ‘curse’ of Babel was newly construed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a contemporary phenomenon, not just the legacy of a Biblical past, but a consequence of new, ‘multicultural’ developments with the vernacular. An inXux of foreign words and a habit of creating new English words out of foreign elements made the early modern vernacular lexicon a ‘hotch-pot’ of native and alien forms. The present chapter aims to remedy the insularity of studies that focus on the rise of a standard, national language in late Renaissance England by reconstructing what

Renaissance writers deemed the ‘Babel’ of early modern English.

This chapter will therefore survey Renaissance ‘Englishes’—not the standard language of early modern vernacular writing, but the variety of regional and social dialects which came to be represented in that writing. The ‘King’s English’ (the phrase is attributed to the reign of Henry V (1413–22)) was not yet a sovereign domain of language, establishing one, accepted ‘rule’ for speech or

the babel of renaissance english 213

writing; rather, Renaissance English was ‘broken’ or divided by divergent, local forms—from southern English to northern English, elite social dialects and underworld language, to specialized terms of the trades. As thousands of foreign words, newly coined words, and revivals of obsolete words were introduced and assimilated into English in this period, writers further contested the boundaries of the native tongue.

The idea that English was ‘confused’ spans the period from the Middle Ages to the middle of the seventeenth century. Anxieties about English, as Chapter 4 has already discussed, preoccupied a range of writers in Middle English. And as Jeremy Smith has demonstrated in Chapter 5, these did not cease with the advent of printing. Instead, Caxton in The Description of Britayne, & also Irlonde taken oute of Polichronicon (1480) speciWcally described the diYculties he faced in attempting to choose among available varieties of spoken English as the basis for his printed texts and translations. Noting the ‘diuerse englissh in the reame of englond’, he observed that ‘a man of kente, Southern western, & northern men speken frenssh all lyke in soune & speche, but they can not speke theyr englissh so’. As in his Prologue to the Eneydos of 1490 (which has already been discussed on pp. 122–3), Caxton records the way that regional diversity divided the nation into mutually unintelligible tongues. Caxton’s ‘good wyf’, as we have seen (see p. 122–3), thus mistakes another regional English dialect as ‘French’—that is, as a foreign language altogether. Alongside regionalized lexis (such as egges or eyren, both of which signiWed ‘eggs’ depending upon geographical location), Caxton includes ‘curyous termes’ or neologisms, and ‘the olde and auncyent englysshe’ (which looked to him ‘more lyke to dutche than englysshe’) among the ‘Englishes’ which he has to choose among. All provided further examples of ‘strange’ or alien terms within the national language.

George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589) reveals a similar engagement with the problem of diversity. Attempting to prescribe the ‘region’ of English that was suitable for formal writing, he places both northern and western speech outside the bounds of his selected norm, which is (as Chapter 5 has noted) given as ‘the vsuall speach of the Court’. Socially deWned varieties of English such as the ‘speach of a craftes man or carter, or other of the inferiour sort, though he be inhabitant or bred in the best towne and Citie in this Realme’ are, as we have seen, also deemed unacceptable in English writing, as are archaisms (‘for their language is now out of vse with vs’) and new coinages (‘inkhorne termes so ill aVected’). Despite Puttenham’s strictures, however, these and other ‘strange’ words were in fact to proliferate in the written English of Renaissance Eng- land—even in (and sometimes especially in) literature. This ‘broken English’ of his contemporaries led the grammarian Alexander Gil to describe them as

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‘Englishmen not speaking English and not understood by English ears’ in his Logonomia Anglica, originally written in Latin in 1619. Half-way through the seventeenth century, the lexicographer Thomas Blount declares that the ‘Babel’ of the vernacular made England a ‘self-stranger’ nation—one growing alien to itself through this diversity of available forms. He dedicates his dictionary of 1656 to the cause of having ‘English Englished’. Arguably, in this context it is not the rise of a standard variety of language, but a new awareness of dialect and variability of discourse—the ‘self-stranger’ English of the Renaissance—that best deWnes the linguistic culture of early modern England.

regions of renaissance english

Although, as previous chapters have noted, medieval authors such as Chaucer observed regional diVerences among speakers of English, the Wrst programmatic accounts of the dialects of English appear in the sixteenth century. The earliest recorded use of the word dialect, referring to a kind of language, dates from 1577, according to the OED. John Bullokar’s An English Expositor (1616) is the Wrst vernacular dictionary to include the term:

Dialect. a diVerence of some words, or pronunciation in any language: as in England the Dialect or manner of speech in the North, is diVerent from that in the South, and the Western Dialect diVering from them both. . . . So euery countrey hath commonly in diuers parts thereof some diVerence of language, which is called the Dialect of that place.

The poet and antiquary Richard Carew in his treatise on the Excellencie of the English Tongue (c1595) commends his native vernacular not only on the grounds that it is ‘copious’ in having borrowed so richly from other languages, but also because of ‘the diuersitie of our Dialects, for wee haue Court and wee haue Countrey English, wee haue Northeine, and Southerne, grosse and ordinarie’. But Carew is unusual in this estimation of the ‘Countrey’ dialects. For most Renaissance writers, like Puttenham, the ‘excellency’ of English did not inhere in the variety of its dialects but—far more narrowly—in just one of them. As the historian and chorographer William Harrison, on p. 416 0f his Description of England (1587), concurs, ‘[T]his excellency of the English tongue is found in one, and the south, part of this island’. For those, like Puttenham and Harrison, who favoured the centralization—and uniWcation—of English in and around the language spoken at Court, locating ‘southern’, ‘northern’, and ‘western’ dialects was more than a matter of mapping the site of linguistic diVerences. It was about

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distinguishing the ‘best’ English from its inferiors, ‘true’ English from the confusion of ‘Englishes’ which could be heard around the nation. Although in the early seventeenth century dialect was, as in Bullokar’s Expositor, chieXy deWned in terms of regionality, notions of social ‘place’—the status of speakers in relation to one another—were also implicit in these earliest linguistic geographies. In the process of demarcating the diVerences among the dialects of English, the Renaissance also served to establish the modern alliance between language and cultural authority.

the ‘western’ dialect

‘Southern’, ‘northern’, and ‘western’ were the broad domains under which early modern writers typically distinguished the regions of Renaissance English. Renaissance writers commonly portray western English as the most foreign of English dialects, at least when seen from the standpoint of an elite social class. As Gil in 1619 writes:

Of all the dialects the Western has the most barbarous Xavour, particularly if you listen to the rustic people from Somerset, for it is easily possible to doubt whether they are speaking English or some foreign language.

Although aristocrats as prominent as Sir Walter Raleigh were said to have spoken with a broad Devonshire accent (and may indeed have helped introduce westernisms into the language at court), the dialect of the south-western shires in its grammar, lexis, as well as its phonology, was generally viewed, as the poet and playwright Thomas Randolph in the fourth act of his The Muses’ Looking Glass (1638) put it as a ‘discourse [that] is all country; an extreme of [i.e. from] Urbanity’. When Ben Jonson chose the western dialect as the primary language for his last completed play, A Tale of a Tub (performed 1633, published 1640), he did so in order to place it at the furthest remove from the Court:

No State-aVaires, nor any politique Club, Pretend wee in our Tale, here, of a Tub. But acts of Clownes and Constables, to day StuVe out the Scenes of our ridiculous Play.

. . .

. . . . to shew what diVerent things

The Cotes of Clownes, are from the Courts of Kings.

(Prologue, 1–4; 11–12)

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In general, the western dialect, at least when seen from the perspective of London writers, represents the untranslatable diVerence—regional, social, intellectual— between courtiers and rustic ‘clowns’.

As ‘heard’ by speakers of the ‘King’s English,’ the signature features of western English included pronunciations which were broadly characteristic of Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall, although south-eastern elements—from Kent and its neighbouring shires—sometimes get mixed up in representations of this dialect as well. These features include the voicing of the consonants [f] and [s] to [v] and [z] respectively; the Wrst-person pronoun ich (rather than I ), and the contractions icham, chill, chwas (‘I am’, ‘I will’, ‘I was’). Other typical markers include the preWx i or y with past participles, as in yvound (‘found’), and the ending -th in the third person plural of the present indicative. Some lines from Shakespeare’s King Lear (spoken by the exiled aristocrat Edgar in his disguise as a poor rustic) may serve to illustrate this dialect and its literary stereotyping:

Chill not let go, zir, without vurther [cagion] . . . Good gentlemen, go your gait, and let poor voke pass. An chud ha’ bin zwagger’d out of my life, ‘twould not ha’ bin zo long as ‘tis by a vortnight. (IV.vi. 235, 237–9)

Such forms are far removed—geographically as well as in their social implica- tions—from those habitually used by Edgar earlier in the play. For westerners, of course, it was conversely the language of the aristocracy that could sound like a strange or foreign tongue: Columel, a simple plowman in the Tudor genealogist John Ferne’s Blazon of Gentrie (1586), reacts to courtly diction by declaring: ‘By my vathers soule . . . I like not this gibberishe’ (2.23).

In one of Scoggin’s Jests (c 1565), attributed to the physician and writer Andrew Boorde, Scoggin tries to teach a poor western youth how to read and write:

The slovenly boy, almost as big as a knave, would begin to learne his A.B.C. Scogin did give him a lesson of nine of the Wrst letters of A.B.C., and he was nine daies in learning of them; and when he had learned the nine . . . the good scholler said: am Ich past the worst now? . . . would God Ich were, for dis is able to comber any man’s wits alive. Scogin then thought his scholler would never bee but a foole, and did apply him as well as he could to his learning; but he, that hath no wit, can never have learning nor wisedome.

Here the forms ich and dis mark the regional origins of Scoggin’s ‘scholler’, as does comber, a contraction of encumber. According to Boorde, the dialect speaker can barely command an alphabet of nine letters, an abridged language that marks the limits of his intellectual powers (and which serves as a clear illustration of the growing—and stereotypical—alliance of dialect and images of cognitive deWciency). John Redford, in his mid-century play Wit and Science, includes, for example, a western dialect speaker among his allegorical

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characters who is named, simply, ‘Ingnorance’. Even when asked his name, Ingnorance can only say, ‘Ich cannot tell’. The anonymous Contention between Liberality and Prodigality (1602) makes western English the language of the labouring classes of the nation in general, whose representative in the drama announces his social role in Act II (2.4.448–9) as follows: ‘Che dig, che delue, che zet, che zow,/ Che mow, che reape, che ply my Xaile’—or, translated into the standard (and non-localized) variety: ‘I dig, I delve, I set, I sow,/ I mow, I reap, I ply my Xaile’. Nicholas Udall’s court interlude Respublica (1553) likewise includes a character who is named, simply, ‘People’. Representing, as he states, ‘the poor Commontie’ of the nation, People further identiWes himself in Act III (III.iii.648– 52) as poor, ignoram (‘ignorant’), and oppressed:

Lett poore volke ha zome parte,

vor we Ignoram people, whom itche doe perzente, wer ner zo I-polde, zo wrong, and zo I-torment. Lorde Ihese Christe whan he was I-pounst & I-pilate, was ner zo I-trounst as we have been of yeares Late.

(‘Let poor folk have some part,

For we ignorant people, whom I do represent,

Were never so plundered, so wronged, and so tormented.

Lord Jesus Christ when he was pounced upon [may alternatively mean ‘struck’ or ‘perforated,’ like metal or glass] and

pilated [i.e. persecuted and scourged by Pontius Pilate]

Was never so trounced [beaten, punished] as we have been of years late’)

As ‘foreign’ as the western dialect seemed (or was made to seem) to southern audiences, it was, also imagined to be a kind of national vox populi—a ‘common’ language of the English ‘People.’

When Boorde, on p. 123 of his Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge

(1542), describes the languages of Cornwall, he explains that ‘In Cornwall is two speches; the one is naughty Englyshe, and the other is Cornyshe speche’ (emphasis added). The idea that regional dialect is a kind of ‘naughty’ or corrupted English is implicit in most Renaissance representations of provincial language. Western speakers, for example, are often ascribed a tendency towards malapropisms— that is, to mistaking or misusing words, once again reifying the prevalent stereotypes of ‘ignorance’ and ‘uneducatedness’ which have already been discussed. Thomas Wilson in his Arte of Rhetorique (1553), for instance, mocks a western speaker’s attempts to use Latinate diction by assuming the terms which were fashionable at the universities and court: